Know your friends' travel itinerary with new Facebook tool

An Indian American student has created a Chrome extension that grabs location data from Facebook Messenger and rapidly plots your friends' locations on a map, The Next Web reported.

We know Facebook shares our location with friends, but most people probably don't realise how easy it is to extract the date.

Aran Khanna, a student developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has created an extension named 'Marauder's Map' through which you can plot the travels of your friends around the country with precise locations.

The tool loads the map in Messenger's web interface. The data is retrieved from messages sent with location sharing enabled, which is 'on' by default in the iOS and Android apps.

The Marauder's Map simply retrieves the latitude and longitude attached to messages from Javascript objects your browser stores.

Facebook Messenger for mobile shares location data like this by default. Facebook pushes Messengers users to enable location sharing when they install the app.

If you don't want to share your location, you can disable the feature by tweaking the settings of your phone and disabling Messenger's location access altogether.